For all the programmers who don’t deeply grok the lambda calculus terminology — Say you are about to call a method on a container, and that container can give you something back of type Tweet. What you really want isn’t a Tweet, but some part of it, say Tweet.getId(). What if, instead of getting the Tweet … Read moreFunctors: What the funk for?
Today I had a sticky problem to solve, the kind business app programmers drool over because it’s nontrivial and contained. Halfway through the TDD process, my logic got all jumbled and I couldn’t see the solution. Stepping back, I took ten minutes to write pseudocode in an F# style, then translated that into Java. Bam! … Read moreF# made Java easier today
Guava’s CacheBuilder provides several options for keeping a cache down to a reasonable size. Entries can expire for multiple reasons, entries can be limited to a certain number, and entries can be made available for garbage collection. These options can be used individually or together. Each is simply one more method call during cache creation. … Read moreKeeping Your Cache Down to Size
Google has released a new version of Guava, and it’s bad news for one of my favorite classes, MapMaker. The exciting feature of MapMaker is its ability to produce an insta-cache, a key-value mapping that calculates values on the fly, expires them, and limits the quantity stored — all while maintaining thread safety. In release … Read moreGoodbye, MapMaker. Hello, CacheBuilder.
Google’s guava library provides a few constructs that let us use functional style in Java. Personally, I enjoy the slightly more declarative style that results, and have a new game of eliminating loops. Unfortunately, it’s Java. Attempting to do anything functionally is rather ugly. What do you think – worth it? or unreadable? Before: public … Read moreGuava: pidgin functional programming in Java